The most famous individual victim of the Holocaust was probably Anne Frank, whose diary became one of the best-selling books of all times.  This book is only tangentially concerned with the Holocaust itself.  To be sure, the diary offers a thorough description of the physical and psychological difficulties of being in hiding—imprisoned really—for years, trying to escape detection by the Nazis, but it is better described as the compelling record of a sensitive girl, who is also a talented writer, going through the difficult period of adolescence under terrible circumstances.  As Cynthia Ozick points out, the diary “cannot count as Anne Frank’s story” because “the end is missing.”  Far from being a “song to life” or “a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit,” phrases that have been used to describe this story, Ozick points out that Anne Frank’s story “is completed by Westerbork (the hellish transit camp in Holland from which Dutch Jews were deported), and by Auschwitz, and by the fatal winds of Bergen-Belsen” (78).  Anne Frank’s story (as distinct from the diary) reminds us that accounts by victims are often incomplete. 

The largest collection of victim accounts comes from survivors.  There are a large number of these accounts, and new ones are appearing regularly.  In a long review article, István Deák claims books by survivors often take on the same form:

 the story generally starts with the description of a more than comfortable pre-Holocaust family life, usually in Poland, with relatively prosperous, adoring parents and lovable brothers and sisters.  The hero is intellectually curious and recalls his considerable academic achievements. . . .   Although many of his family members perish, the author’s inner dignity and readiness to help others keep him alive.  After the war, he goes abroad, usually to the United Sates, where he founds a new family and once again becomes fairly prosperous.  He is haunted, however, by recurring nightmares from which some relief is provided by his addressing young audiences on the Holocaust and by his generous contributions to worthy Jewish causes.  (“Memories of Hell” 38)

Deák’s point is not that such a story is false, but that books like this are “often repetitive or lacking in distinction or insight” and “many details appear to have been embellished by selective memory.”  Our culture tends to expect survivor stories to assume a particular form, so it is not surprising that many survivors have obliged.[2]  In his memoirs, published in 1995, Elie Wiesel seems to be remarking on the same phenomenon, but in a more charitable light:  “Testimony from survivors tends to begin with these sorts of descriptions, evoking loved ones as well as one’s hometown before the annihilation, as if breathing life into them one last time” (All Rivers . . . 319).

There is a considerable amount of oral history from survivors as well.  With the profits from Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to videotaping eyewitness Holocaust survivor testimonies worldwide for historical preservation, research, and educational purposes.  To date, more than 33,000 interviews have been recorded, in 45 countries and 29 languages,” according to explanatory letter distributed by the foundation and dated August 1997.  These videotapes are then digitized and catalogued; they are to be available to the public through a sophisticated computer system (the “Digital Library System”) available at five repositories.[3]  The U.S. Holocaust Museum has its own oral history section; the results of some of its work is the videotape that visitors can see at the conclusion of the exhibits.

The amount of survivor testimony available in various forms is overwhelming.  Much of it offers only a tiny view of the process itself, and it can occasionally be self-serving for what are often very understandable reasons.  In view of the vast quantity of material, it is hard to keep in mind that survivor stories have another inherent distortion:  the vast majority of Holocaust victims did not survive.  In the stories of those who did, such factors as courage and random chance often appear to have a beneficial outcome.  We have to keep in mind that these same factors often led to an individual’s death; in fact, this is most often the case.  Yet survivor stories (and the stories of victims who did not survive) are crucial to our students’ understanding because they personalize this massive tale of destruction.  For this reason, the U.S. Holocaust museum recommends in its “Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust” that instructors should “translate statistics into people.”

Out of the enormous amount of material on the survivors, this chapter explores how three works are particularly well suited for writing classes.  The first, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, can work very well as an introduction to the Holocaust.  Because the story is told through the medium of “the comics,” students find it very accessible.  But there is little that is “comic” about the story of Vladek Spiegeleman, the author’s father, and his mother, both of whom manage to survive by combination of extraordinary resourcefulness on the part of Vladek and sheer luck.  The story continues after the the Holocaust to show how for many survivors, there really is no end to the suffering and horror.  Speigelman takes great care to set the historical context for his father’s experiences, so that even students without much direct knowledge of the Holocaust can understand the story.  I suggest a number of writing assignments that can lead from this book.

The second work I suggest is Elie Wiesel’s Night, first published in French in 1958.  Since its appearance in English that same year, it has become one of the most widely read survivor accounts.  This book is widely read in high school, partially because it is quite short and easy to follow.  My experience has been that students who have read this work two or three years earlier in high school often fail to appreciate the minimalist style that Wiesel uses; they haven’t had much experience in reading to fill in the gaps with their own imagination and knowledge.  There are many similarities between Night and Maus: both use a minimalist style, both are autobiographical, both examine the relationship between a Holocaust victim and his son.  These points of connection suggest a writing assignment that compares the two works.  But the differences are even more striking.  After the experience of writing about Maus, students are often well prepared to deal with complexities of Night.

To broaden the students’ experience of thinking about the victims, I suggest using excerpts from Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah.  This 1985 documentary runs for a total of nine and a half hours—far too long to show to a group of students (quite difficult for any group of people to watch in its entirety).  The subtitle of the Lanzmann’s film is An Oral History of the Holocaust.  As a full-scale history, the film has a number of shortcomings, but it more than makes up for them in the intensity of the interviews. The film, though, is suitable for viewing in a writing course because it uses no archival footage.  The camera will frequently pan across the scene of a death camp as it appeared in the later 1970s (Lanzmann ceased filming about 1980 and spent five years editing the film).  The story of the Holocaust is told almost entirely in the words of the survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders, but Lanzmann exerts a powerful interpretive force through his editing of the film.  His own interpretations are shown most strongly in his treatment of the Poles and other bystanders, portions of the film that I discuss in Chapter 6 and 7.[4]  But it is quite feasible to show students excerpts of the film that deal with the victims, so that they can begin to attach real faces to the experiences that they are reading about in Maus and Night.  In addition, Shoah is quite accessible in many video stores, and there are two published versions of the English text of the film.[5]

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is one of the most effective texts I have found to engage students in writing topics.  Every time I have used it, students are immediately interested in it.  Their interest is sustained as they move from an appreciation of Maus’ simplicity and accessibility to a realization of how complex this apparently simple text is. The writing they produce in response to the book is frequently compelling, largely because they are interested in explaining their ideas.  It is paradoxical that a book that relies so much on graphic arts to convey its meanings should work so well in a writing class.  The very nature of Maus as a complex graphic arts memoir, where the artwork is at least as important as the text, where the double story line of Vladek’s experiences during the Holocaust and Art’s relationship with his father presents a complex narrative, can perhaps explain this success.  Whatever the reasons, though, this book offers writing teachers a wonderful opportunity to introduce students to a wide variety of writing tasks—literary analysis, historical study, and personal essay.

The books have also been issued in the form of a CD-ROM—The Complete Maus.  Because Spiegelman’s original work was designed for a book format, the CD-ROM needs to reproduce the book in that form; Spiegelman himself did not like having to shoehorn his work into the format of a CD-ROM.  I find it cumbersome to use the CD-ROM to read the text of the books.  The real value of the CD-ROM is in its supplementary materials.  The CD-ROM has hundreds of drawings showing earlier versions of many of the panels Spiegelman produced for the finished product.  There are also sound-clips of Spiegelman explaining some of the background to certain sections of the book.  Most interesting of all is that some panels include sound-clips from the original tape recording of Art Spiegelman interviewing his father (who died in 1982), and the entire transcript of these interviews is available in another section.  While these materials may prove useful for an in-depth study of Spiegelman’s creative process, it is more detailed than most students need.  In addition, there are reviews of the book, an interview with Art Spiegelman, an account of his trip to Poland to do research for Maus II (complete with home vidoes taken by his wife), and facsimiles of historical documents related to the Spiegelmans’ arrest by the Nazis.  If it is possible to make the CD-ROM available for students to use (such as the reserve desk of the library), it can serve as an excellent resource for the book.

It is not hard to understand why students are so fascinated by this book when they first delve into it.  First, it is easy to read: most students can make their way through Parts I and II in less than four or five hours.  The storyline is entertaining—exciting, disturbing, and even at times amusing.  All the students are accustomed to reading the comics, and as a result of their wide exposure to television and film media, they are accustomed to interpreting visual texts.  The use of flashbacks and flashforwards usually cause most student readers little difficulty.  Furthermore, the subject of the book is something in which most of them have some interest—the Holocaust—and while Vladek’s story is grim enough when one ponders the details, the use of animal figures to represent various ethnic groups presents the Holocaust in manageable symbolic terms.  What is more important to me as a writing teacher, though, is how the work supports extended inquiry.  Although it entices students’ interest by its comic book form, it sustains it by its attention to both historical and personal detail.  For this reason, the work serves as the ideal text on which students can build an understanding of connections between the personal and the collective, between autobiography and history.

Most writing teachers would agree that good writing is closely related to careful reading.  Maus is ideal for this purpose, for the students realize quite soon that the work is crafted with painstaking care and that almost each page reveals subtle rewards for careful readers.  In the first chapter, it works well for the class to look at how the details Spiegelman supplies about his father are crucial to understanding him later.  Toward the end of this chapter, Vladek says, “But this what I just told you . . . I don’t want you should write this in your book.  It has nothing to do with Hitler, with the Holocaust” (I 23).[6]  The students can usually see that this isn’t quite true:  we learn a great deal about Vladek’s character from his early behavior.  In his description of himself, we see his vanity:  “People always told me I looked just like Rudolph Valentino” (I 13).  In his treatment of Lucia Greenberg, we see his calculating nature, a characteristic that is further developed in his behavior when he first visits Anja’s house and snoops in her medicine chest (I 19).  (I often ask one of the men students if he usually goes through the medicine cabinet when he is invited to his girlfriend’s home the first time.)   Some classes will exhibit some disagreement among the sexes as to the behavior of Vladek and Lucia.  Men students typically read the scene as evidence of the trials that occur when one breaks off a relationship with a girlfriend: for these students Lucia Greenberg is the prototype of the woman in Fatal Attraction.  Women students often see the incident as evidence that Vladek was nothing more than a sexual opportunist who deserves his difficulties when he tried to break up with Lucia.  This discussion provides a good opportunity to show the students how their interpretations of the story are colored by their previous experiences.  It can even suggest to some students how they might reinterpret their own experiences with the opposite sex.  The last page of the chapter offers another opportunity for the students to ponder the complexities of self-portrayal:  if Vladek really did ask Art not to include any of these stories in his book, why did Art disobey him?  Furthermore, why does Spiegelman portray himself as promising his father that he won’t mention what Vladek calls “such private things” (I 23)?  Students are capable of providing thoughtful answers to this question, but I usually ask them to discuss possibilities in small groups instead of asking them to provide an answer in open-class discussion.  They usually decide that Spiegelman is establishing his relationship with his readers in this first chapter:  by showing us that he lied to his father, he paradoxically manages to suggests that he will be quite honest with readers.  As one student later put it in a paper, “Spiegelman suggests that his relationship with the readers is stronger than his relationship with his father, so we can trust him to tell the truth later on.”[7]

After this introduction, which I usually conduct as a class discussion, another good technique is to ask the students to work in small groups on particular topics that the instructor supplies.  I provide some guide questions that are designed to get them to read the work in a somewhat different way.  The students are then asked to teach this portion of the book to the class; this teaching usually results in a somewhat self-conscious short lecture or discussion by the group members, but the sense of engagement that students exhibit makes the activity worthwhile.  I have used the following topics as prompts; Maus is a rich enough text that it would not be hard to think of more:

·        Throughout the work, Spiegelman gives us two apparently contradictory views of what Vladek Spiegelman was like, one given by Vladek himself as he sees and remembers himself and the other by his son, Art.  What are the distinguishing characteristics of these two views?  What are some key scenes throughout the book that would show support for your interpretation of these two characters?  Are these two views of the same character in fact contradictory?  Can they be reconciled?

·        Maus is a memoir in two obvious ways:  it is the record of Vladek telling of his experiences throughout the Holocaust, and it is also the story of Art getting the story from his father.  In Part I, Vladek’s story appears to have precedence, and Art’s story appears to be only a framing device.  But in Part II, Art’s story takes on greater importance, especially in the “Time Flies” section of Part II.  There is another, more subtle memoir going on, however:  Artie’s recollection of his childhood to various people, sort of a sub-memoir during the Artie story.  The first brief story comes on I, 43 when Artie tells the story of how his father would treat him when he wouldn’t eat all his food.  What purpose do these stories serve in relation to the larger stories (Vladek’s experiences before and during the Holocaust, and Artie’s experience of writing the story)?  What dimension do the stories add to the narrative as a whole?  What is Art’s purpose in telling these stories at the time that he does?  Include in your consideration the “Prisoner from Hell Planet” sequence, which may be considered another kind of memoir altogether, but could also be included in this memoir-within-a-memoir group.  Look carefully at pages I, 130-32 (for Mala’s memories of life with Vladek) and II, 14-16.

·        In many ways, Maus is like a movie in that Spiegelman has to set up “shots” of the various scenes he creates.  He has uses “flash forwards” (a cut to scenes that jumps forward in time) and “flashbacks” (cuts to scenes that go back in time).  There are also close-ups (see I, 109, 3rd panel for a particular dramatic one).  Finally, there are “voiceovers”—Vladek’s voice from the present narrating the scenes from the war when the only images one sees are from the earlier period.  Look through the book and see if you can find some good examples of these “cinematic” techniques.  Be sure to consider some of the stranger effects in the “Time Flies” chapter in Part II.

I usually have a range of possible answers in mind in posing these areas for the students’ study; even so, I have frequently been surprised by their answers.  Instead of having the students develop these answers in small groups, it works well for questions like these to serve as prompts for journal assignments.  I emphasize to the students that the questions are only prompts, questions to get them started.  Theorists such a Peter Elbow (“Closing my Eyes”) remind us many writers need to explore a topic in writing without regard to their audience as a technique for developing their own ideas. 

Another reason for engaging in exercises like these is to encourage students not to achieve closure on their ideas too early.  Perhaps because of earlier writing experiences in which the importance of developing a thesis or central idea was impressed upon them, students in introductory courses are prone to one-dimensional readings, which they then develop into essays.  As Stephen E. Tabachnick points out in an extended analysis of the structure of the work, “there are no saints among the main characters in Maus” (156):  this characteristic of the work helps push students toward more complex views of the characters.  For example, some of my students have argued that the Art Spiegelman’s character is basically “bad” because he is often impatient with his father and even selfish in his single-minded determination to extract the story of his experiences in the war.  This gives a good opportunity to show how their writing can be strengthened by considering contrary evidence:  instances that show how difficult Vladek is to live with, examples that show Art being conscious of his less-than-admirable behavior.  In addition, students can analyze the important fact that it is this same Art Spiegelman who is portraying himself in this manner.

Many students taking writing courses have the impression that instruction in “writing” mostly involves attention to proper form—punctuation, proper citation form, and “grammar.”  Most writing teachers have a considerably broader definition of what writing instruction entails; we are generally more concerned about the quality of students’ ideas than some of them expect.  One of the wonderful difficulties in using Maus is that the text is so accessible and at the same time so rich in interpretative possibilities that it is hard to determine when the class as a whole has developed enough ideas and is ready to start writing.  In an introductory writing course, especially one that includes as one of its purposes the teaching of academic discourse conventions, it is necessary to focus in class on how students are going to express their ideas, sometimes before students are ready to exploit the text fully.  In a more advanced class, the book serves well to introduce more complex notions about writing, about the relationship between autobiography and history.  Fortunately, Maus works equally well in these different courses.

Using Maus to Teach Conventions of Academic Discourse

Some students, often those who are not particularly adept at verbal expression, have a much better eye for visual detail than do I.  Whatever the students’ abilities in this area, I try to devise assignments that require them to explain in writing an effect that they experience visually.  The verbal skills that this requires seem to me to be similar to the task of paraphrasing or summarizing complex material without the difficulties that result from working with another text—namely the tendency to plagiarize, even inadvertently.  In other words, the task of rendering into one’s own words a complex text requires similar skills to the task of putting into words the meaning of a complex visual text, but working from the visual text eliminates the temptation to plagiarize that arises from working with a verbal text.  Both tasks ask the writer to form a complex meaning originating with an experience with some other text and to do so using his or her own language.  The task of working with other texts may be more challenging because the ideas come expressed in a form that to many beginning writers seems so inextricably tied to their meaning that one has to use the original language. Describing a visual text requires students to “read” in different ways and to transform that reading into their own words.  Getting the students to “paraphrase” their reading of a visual text in this way is an excellent introduction to having them work with verbal texts.

I have also found it helpful to have them “quote” from Maus in a variety of ways.  One problem that inexperienced writers working with literature have is that they don’t always understand the degree to which academic writing on literature requires that evidence be provided by means of quotations from the text.  Students can easily quote the verbal text that form part of Maus, and for some of their points, short quotations from the work are all the evidence they will need.  These can be handled by telling students to simply cite them as they would any other quotations.  Sometimes, though, it is necessary for a student to reproduce a short stretch of dialogue in the form of a blocked-out quotation.  I instruct my students to reproduce Spiegelman’s dialogue as if they were writing a play.  For example, a student could reproduce the dialogue in which Art and Vladek argue over the Special K as follows:

Vladek:   I’ll pack the foods what Mala left to return it over to the Shop-Rite.  Help yourself for a little cereal.

Art:   No thanks.  I’ll stick to coffee.

Vladek:   Please.  Just taste and you’ll see how good it is.

Art:   No thanks.  I don’t like Special K.

Vladek:   But it has salt and also sugar.  For me it’s poison—I’ll give for you a little, yes Françoise?

Françoise:   No thanks.

Vladek:   It’s a shame to waste.  I’ll pack and you can take it home with you.

Art:   The box is almost empty.  Just leave it here.

Vladek:   Okay, if not, is not.  Only just try then a piece from this fruit cake.

Art:   I’M NOT HUNGRY.

Vladek:   So, fine.  I can pack the fruitcake in with the cereal for you to take home.

Art:   Look.  We don’t want any, OK?  Just forget it!

Vladek:   I cannot forget it.  Ever since Hitler I don’t like to throw out even a crumb.

Art:   Then just SAVE the damn Special K in case Hitler ever comes back!

Vladek:   I can glue together the box, but STILL I don’t think the Shop-Rite will exchange it.

(II, 78)

This method of quoting works well if the student wishes to concentrate only on the verbal text—if, for example, a student wanted to point out that before Art loses his temper, he says no to Vladek twice and implies no three other times.

Although the drawings in this scene show the dynamics of the conversation in small ways (the shadowing of Art’s face in the bottom left panel on II 78 or the cloud over Art’s head indicating anger and self-disgust in the bottom right panel on the same page), a full analysis of the more visual scenes require students to describe the text both visually and verbally.  I encourage the students to photocopy pages from the text, cut out the panels that they wished to emphasize, and insert these panels into their own text just as they would a long quotation.  Then, rather than simply using the reproduced text to make the point, the students must describe and interpret the excerpt, making their explanation fit in with the rest of the essay—really the same techniques that they would use with a purely verbal text from a more conventional piece of literature.  The difference is that the students must provide a verbal rendering of a text they have first experienced visually.[8]

Both this technique and the practice of citing long quotations in the style of play gives students an opportunity to practice the techniques of providing lead-ins to and follow-ups to the “quotation” (excerpted material).  I have the students summarize a portion of the story leading up to the quoted material, identify the characters depicted in the drawings, and provide background information necessary to understand the verbal text accompanying the drawing.  In a follow-up to the quotation, they need to interpret the excerpt, making clear to the reader what elements in the excerpt connect with the point being developed in the paper.  These are really the same skills we often expect students to develop and practice when they quote from more conventional literary texts.

The Relationship Between Autobiography and History

Numerous critics have commented on the self-reflexive nature of Maus, on how Spiegelman is interested in portraying his own creative processes at work.  For advanced classes or for a follow-up assignment in introductory classes, Maus offers many opportunities to explore the nature of autobiography, of biography, and of the difficulties of representation.  As students begin to learn more about the Holocaust, it naturally occurs to them that none of us can ever knew what it was “really” like, no matter how detailed or realistic descriptions of the experience are.  Excerpts from Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah work very well for this purpose (see the suggestions later in this chapter).

A little bit of this kind of viewing goes a long way toward putting Vladek’s memories in a wider context. The students do not have to read a critic such as Barbara Foley to be able to grasp the idea that the Holocaust’s “full dimensions are inaccessible to the ideological framework that we have inherited from the liberal era” (333).  By exploring the problem that Spiegelman is facing in Chapter Two of Book II, as he tries to represent the destruction process at Auschwitz, the students can more readily understand a critic such as Miles Orvell who interprets the ending of Chapter Two, Book II, “Auschwitz (time flies)” as an instance of “the changed reality of postmodernism.”  Art and Françoise comment on how peaceful and still it is in the Catskills, so much so that “it’s almost impossible to believe Auschwitz ever happened” (II 74), as Françoise puts it.  Art then complains about the mosquitoes and sprays them with pesticide.  Orvell comments,

Thus . . .  do we pass from nightmares to petty annoyances, from gas chambers to spray cans, from corpses to dead flies.  The ironic disproportion between past and present emphasizes the disjunction between the father and son, but also draws a line of separation between the anguish of Art and the relative insouciance (albeit sympathetic) of Françoise.  (125)

Such ideas, when stated in language like this, are not easy for most writing students.  Nevertheless, students can understand that Spiegelman himself is probably writing about our inability to understand an event so far removed from usual experience.  Exposure to ideas such as this helps move the students beyond interpretations in which they try to determine why the mosquitoes should represent the Jews.  If that is the case, then who does Art represent?  (It does offer a good opening for students to explore why the Nazis should have relied on Zyklon B, a pesticide, at Auschwitz or why Spiegelman chose to represent the Jews as mice, as vermin.)  Orvell’s larger point—that this provides a good instance of the postmodern condition—is something that that my advanced writing students can begin to explore.

In other words, while recent criticism of Maus provides the writing teachers with interesting ideas to suggest to the class, we need to keep in mind that our goal in using this text in a writing class need not include a full understanding of such criticism.  The most accessible discussion concerning the relationship of history to autobiography is probably Joseph Witek’s chapter in The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. In Witek’s perception that the book “makes Vladek’s Holocaust story and Art’s psychological quest into a single narrative which blends public and private history” (115), we find the most value of this book to a writing course.  Students in writing courses are not able to write a full-fledged historical account because they lack the necessary background knowledge.  But they are experts in their own lives, just as Vladek was in his and Anja in hers.  The case of Anja is particularly important because of the importance that Spiegelman gives to her attempts to record that history in writing.  Maus is a fine demonstration of how in the act of writing personal stories, we can in some cases begin to fuse the personal with the collective. Maus prepares the students for the possibility that people often have other purposes in telling stories about themselves besides the straightforward communication of events.

Promoting Broader Purposes for a Writing Course

Let me suggest some reasons why Maus works well in a course in which the instructor is determined to emphasize the students’ freedom in topic selection.  Although the ostensible subject of the book is the Holocaust, many students are attracted to the conflict between Art and Vladek, a conflict exacerbated by the Holocaust, but still universal in the relationships between parents and children.  Because they are so close to adolescence, many students can identify with Art as the rebellious son.  But many of these same students criticize Art for his callous treatment of his father (pointing out his selfish interest only in completing the memoir, rather than just providing his father with company, or his short temper with his father, and his refusal to help Vladek with jobs around the house).  It is not hard in class discussion or small-group work for students to see there is plenty of blame to go around, that Vladek was a very difficult father.  This line of inquiry leads some students into developing interesting essays on the subject of co-dependency or destructive patterns within families.  It is even possible to ask students to write personal essays in which they describe similar patterns in their own families.  Other students may be more struck by the historical aspects of the text: because they are interested in the Holocaust, they read Vladek’s story with considerable interest.  It doesn’t take long before they realize that Vladek’s story seems almost unbelievable in the number of close escapes.  I explain that his story is not an unusual survivor story, that in fact many survivor stories have these qualities because we only have the stories of the survivors not the dead victims, so that statistically, it makes sense that this type of story would predominate.  But even this explanation does not completely deal with the degree to which Vladek is always the hero of his story.  This line of inquiry can lead some students into investigating the nature of story-telling, leading them to an understanding of how Spiegelman himself seems aware of how a story told by its hero is problematic.  What is most important for teachers with this theoretical orientation is that Maus, by the nature of its central themes, will serve to prompt a wide range of interesting topics.

Maus can serve as a good introduction to the Holocaust in general.  Some observers, however, disagree; Hillel Halkin, for example, addresses this issue in his review in Commentary.  After offering several plausible reasons for why the book might be considered useful in a high school history class, Halkin continues ironically:

And finally, it makes sense.  Why did the Germans murder the Jews, who did not fight back, while third parties like the Poles let it happen?  For the same reason that cats kill mice, who do not attack cats, while pigs do not care about either: because that’s the way it is, boys and girls, and next week we will be studying the Marshall Plan and beginning of the cold war.

But that is not the way it is and not the way it was, and it is here that our history teacher, if all conscientious, might have second thoughts.  The Holocaust was a crime committed by humans against humans, not—as Nazi theory held—by one biological species against another.  And while the German campaign of annihilation against the Jews and the reactions of the various peoples caught up in it had to do with many factors, historical, political, sociological, and ideological, instinctual behavior, except insofar as we all have instincts of aggression and survival, was not one of them.  (55)

The issue of Jewish resistance—and the perceived absence of it—is a complex issue.  It is plausible that some students, when asked to interpret the work entirely on their own, will occasionally conclude Spiegelman is suggesting a kind of genetic determinism.  My experience, though, is that students are more likely to criticize Spiegelman along the lines that Halkin himself is doing.  The use of animals, though, points out how Maus is really a more difficult work to analyze than it appears at first.  In using this work to introduce the Holocaust, we need to explore in class this question of how the animal imagery functions.

Approximately half of my students are somewhat surprised to learn that it is not accurate to refer to Jews as a “race”; for these students Spiegelman’s drawings seem to make perfect sense.[9]  In class discussion, though, it is easy for them to see that Spiegelman’s distinctions are not made along racial lines:  cats, pigs, dogs, frogs, and fish are different species, but Germans, Poles, Americans, French, and British are basically the same “race.”  Furthermore, African-Americans are represented as black dogs (II 98-100).  Of course, Jews are always represented as mice, even American Jews, but by this point the students realize that simply thinking of the animal representation as symbolizing genetic characteristics is too simplistic.  Once alerted to this subtlety, students are able to discover others:  Art’s discussion of how he should draw Françoise (II 11-12), the presence of the nonferocious cats, both as German soldiers (II 54) and as civilians (II 130), and even German-Jewish children (mice with cat stripes in II 131), the difficulties of determining whether someone was Jewish (II 50), and the presence of Poles and Germans among the victims (II 28, II 64).  Students can be asked to look for these kinds of instances as part of journal writing.  But the richest topic to explore is Spiegelman use of masks, both as ordinary disguises as in Part I, when Vladek and Anja are in hiding (136-41, 144, 146, 149 and 155) and as something else (Jewish identity?  professional roles?) in the “Time Flies” section (II 41-47).  When students consider these issues in some depth, they are in little danger of making simplistic assumptions that equate ethnic and religious identity with genetic characteristics.

There are other reasons that the use of the animals is a strength of the work.  In selecting material to be used as a common topic in a writing course, teachers need to be extremely sensitive to the fact that students in a writing course are a captive audience, more so that in other courses:  they almost always take the course because they have to, not because they were interested in the subject matter.  So if teachers are going to select works for the class to study in common, they need to take into account the sensibilities of the students.   The Holocaust as a topic in a writing course requires the teacher to consider carefully why and how scenes of extreme brutality, cruelty, and human suffering will be presented and discussed.   These scenes are represented in Maus, but only through Spiegelman’s drawings, in which humans are represented as mouse figures.  No student I have taught has had any difficulty in conceiving of these mouse figures as human beings, but scenes of brutality, such as the image of German soldiers killing children by swinging them by their heels and dashing their heads against a wall (I 108) or the scenes of killing at Auschwitz (II 72), have much less impact in Maus than they do in any work that depends on archival footage or photographs.  We must remember that all artistic representations of the Holocaust have the effect of softening the horror of these scenes.[10]  Nevertheless, as a work on the Holocaust, Maus is more than simply the story of Vladek Spiegelman.  In setting the context for Vladek’s experiences, Spiegelman takes care to illustrate a number of themes in the experience of the Jews during the Holocaust:  the social and economic status of the Zylberberg family, into which Vladek was married; the confusing role played by Vladek as a conscript into the Polish Army at the start of the war, along with the role of Poland itself (illustrated with maps as on I 60 and the back cover of Volume I); the increasing restrictions on the Jews in Sosnowiec as Nazi rule tightens its grip on that area of Poland, including the role of the black market, the Jewish Council, and the Jewish Police; the methods by which Jews survived illegally after the vast majority had been deported to concentration camps; and methods of survival at a place like the workcamp at Auschwitz.  Like Spielberg does in Schindler’s List, Spiegelman even devises a way to describe the experience of the majority of the victims as Auschwitz:  Vladek describes the story of a fellow prisoner who worked as a member of the Sonderkommando.  To draw this section of the book, Spiegelman engaged in painstaking research, including visits to Poland, when he visited Auschwitz itself and the town of Sosnowiec where Vladek, Anja, and the Zylberbergs lived (Dreifus 37).  A good historically based assignment is to ask students to trace in other sources some of the descriptions of the Holocaust in Maus.

Although Maus is extraordinarily rich in teaching possibilities, other topics besides the Holocaust preoccupy the author.  Maus II, which brings the story up about 1982, just a short time before Vladek Spiegelman’s death, focuses more and more on the relationship that Vladek has with son Art.  The experience of the Holocaust is mediated through Spiegelman.  One of the most brilliant books written by a survivor is Night by Elie Wiesel.  Along with Primo Levi, Wiesel ranks as one of the preeminent writers among the survivors.  Unlike Levi, though, many of Wiesel’s books are short and deceptively easy to read.  For these reasons, Night is very well suited for a writing course.  The students can use it to a focus point for other Holocaust topics related to survivors or they can concentrate on the book itself as a work of literature.  Because of these virtues, it is also quite likely that many students will have already read this book in a high school course.  While students might know the general story of Wiesel’s experience, they are very likely to be quite unfamiliar with the general setting and background of Wiesel’s life.

Currently professor of the humanities at Boston College, Wiesel was almost 30 when Night was first published in French in 1958.  The English translation appeared in 1960.  The book had been a reworked version from of a much longer book written in Yiddish Un die welt hot geshvign (“And the World Stayed Silent”), which was first published in 1955 in Buenos Aires.  The story of how Wiesel came to write Night gives students a good example of the difficulties of rendering experience into language.  They might also come to appreciate better the spare style that Wiesel developed. 

Although Wiesel wrote a great deal as a journalist, which had been his profession ever since concluding his studies at the Sorbonne in late 1947, he had felt inadequate to the task of writing about the Holocaust itself.  In his memoirs, he describes some of the reasons for this hesitation:

Even then I was aware of the deficiencies and inadequacies of language.  Words frightened me.  What exactly did it mean to speak?  Was it a divine or diabolical act?  The spoken word and the written word do not reflect the same experience. . . .   Having become obstacles more than points of reference, words broke my spirit.  I had no confidence in them, for I sensed what I would later come to feel with greater certainty:  Human words are too impoverished, too transparent to express the Event.  (150-51)

Wiesel had grown up in a Hasidic community, which placed more emphasis on the heart than the intellect in its practice of Judaism.  In addition, Wiesel had been particularly taken with mysticism of the Cabala.  This approach to the world has profoundly affected how he regards the Holocaust itself; he sees it in an almost mystical light.  At the same time, he feels compelled to witness what he experienced to the rest of the world.  As Michiko Kakutani notes in a review of his memoirs, this creates “a dialectical conflict in his work between the need to testify and the futility of all explanation.” 

Wiesel also describes feelings of inadequacy and mistrust of ordinary literary forms to describe the Holocaust in the essay “An Interview Unlike Any Other,” which appears in A Jew Today (1978):

I knew that the role of the survivor was to testify.  Only I did not know how.  I lacked experience, I lacked a framework.  I mistrusted the tools, the procedures.  Should one say it all or hold it all back?   Should one shout or whisper?  Place the emphasis on those who were gone or on their heirs?  How does one describe the indescribable?  How does one use restraint in re-creating the fall of mankind and the eclipse of the gods?  And then, how can one be sure that the words, once uttered, will not betray, distort the message they bear?  (15)

The anguish that resulted from these feelings led Wiesel to take a vow:  “not to speak, not to touch upon the essential for at least ten years” (15).  In this same essay, though, Wiesel describes another important influence—meeting the writer François Mauriac, who at 69 was the most significant French writer of his day.  Not only was he a major novelist, having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952, but he had been an ardent supporter of De Gaulle and wrote a political column. 

In 1954 Wiesel interviewed Mauriac in the hope that he could help Wiesel get an interview with Pierre Mendès-France, the French prime minister who had recently extracted the French from Vietnam.  The conversation never got around to that topic, though, because Mauriac, a devout Catholic, spoke of Jesus and his suffering and death.  Wiesel replied that he “knew Jewish children who had suffered more than Jesus and of whom we did not speak” (All Rivers 266).  Thinking he had insulted Mauriac, Wiesel left his apartment, only to be brought back from the elevator by Mauriac, where they spoke about the Holocaust and Wiesel’s reluctance to write about it.  At the conclusion of the meeting, Mauriac embraced him and said, “I think that you are wrong.  You are wrong not to speak . . .  Listen to the old man that I am; one must speak out—one must also speak out” (quoted in A Jew Today 19).

At the time, Wiesel was working as the French correspondent for an Israeli newspaper that wanted him to check out reports that the Catholic Church had been offering free passage to Brazil and money to dissatisfied Jews who had recently arrived in Israel, on the condition that they covert to Catholicism.  It was on that sea voyage from Marseilles, France, to Brazil that Wiesel first started to write about the Holocaust. In his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel recounts how he came to write the book that would later become Night:

I spent most of the voyage in my cabin working.  I was writing my account of the concentration camp years—in Yiddish.  I wrote feverishly, breathlessly, without rereading.  I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my own survival.  I wrote to speak to those who were gone.  As long as I spoke to them, they would live on, at least in my memory.  (239-40)

When the ship arrived in São Paulo, it turned out that there were a number of these Jewish passengers traveling third class.  They were denied entrance into the country, and Wiesel traveled with them down the coast of South America as they looked for a place to land, serving as their spokesman and advocate.  (Eventually, they were allowed to land in Brazil.)   While they were in Buenos Aires, a Jewish book publisher, who had come aboard to help with the problem, happened to notice Wiesel’s manuscript and offered to publish it if it was good.[11]  The publisher made good on his promise, and the Yiddish book was published in December 1955 in Buenos Aires (All Rivers 277).

In the meantime, Wiesel translated the book into French and reworked it.  The first to read the book in its newly abridged form was Mauriac, who showed the manuscript to his own publisher and promised to help support the book as much as he could.  The publisher refused: “No one’s interested in the death camps anymore.  It won’t sell” (quoted in All Rivers 267).  The Preface that Mauriac wrote for Night needs to be understood in this context; it was originally designed to solicit favorable attention from the reviewers.[12]  It contains small inaccuracies that Wiesel, who was so grateful to the great writer, was not able to correct.  Wiesel did not say, for example, that he was one of the Jewish children at the Paris train station, and Mauriac sets the book in much more of a Christian context than the text suggests.

While Mauriac was using his influence to get a publisher for the manuscript, Wiesel became the New York correspondent for his newspaper.  Later in 1956, Wiesel was hit by a taxicab while crossing a street and was confined to a wheelchair for the next year.[13]  As he was convalescing in 1957, the French publisher Jérôme Lindon (Éditions de Minuit) agreed to publish the book.  Wiesel himself had cut the 862 pages of the original Yiddish text down to 245 for the published version.  Lindon edited the manuscript down to 178 pages.  Much of the original descriptions of the early life in Singhet was cut out; it was Lindon’s idea to begin the novel with the story of Moshe the Beadle.  Lindon also objected to the title “All the World Remained Silent”; eventually, he and Wiesel agreed on La Nuit (All Rivers 319).

Through this vast winnowing process and with the help of a good editor, Wiesel developed the “deliberately spare style” of Night and that he used in his subsequent novels.  Out of this process, Wiesel found that he could use words to describe the unknowable:

It is the style of the chroniclers of the ghettos, where everything had to be said swiftly, in one breath.  You never knew when the enemy might kick in the door, sweeping us away in nothingness.  Every phrase was a testament.  There was no time or reason for anything superfluous.  Words must not be imprisoned or harnessed, not even in the silence of the page.  And yet, it must be held tightly.  If the violin is to sing, its strings must be stretched so tight as to risk breaking; slack they are merely threads.

I dwell on Wiesel’s own description of his writing and the process he went through to arrive at it, because students may see this style, which appears rather obvious to us, as simply a method of getting to the point quickly, of writing a work that is easy and accessible.  What Wiesel does not say is sometimes more important than what he does say.  This method suited his mysticism:

To write is to plumb the unfathomable depths of being.  Writing lies within the domain of mystery.  The space between any two words is vaster than the distance between heaven and earth.  To bridge it you must close your eyes and leap.  A Hasidic tradition tells us that in the Torah the white spaces, too, are God-given.  Ultimately, to write is an act of faith.  (321)

It is not necessary to feel the same necessity to see the Holocaust as mystical event in order to understand Wiesel’s vision.  To read Night sensitively, one must be able to fill in the gaps—provide meaning for those at least some of white spaces.  For this reason, a close reading of Night can be very rewarding.

One significant question that first arises is whether the book is a novel or a memoir.  How accurate is it?  Is the character Eliezer identical with the real person Elie Wiesel?  These questions arose for me in the first couple of chapters because of the prophetic quality of two characters,  Moshe the Beadle, the foreign Jew who is deported from Wiesel’s town earlier and survives a mass execution to return to warn the others of what is to come,  and Madame Schächter, the mad woman aboard the train on the way to Auschwitz.  What these two characters foresee is quite accurate, but does real life often supply people who fit so neatly into a literary form?

Wiesel tells us at the beginning that he comes from Sighet, “that little town in Transylvania where I spent my childhood” (1).  He does not supply many details about this place, which has the effect of universalizing his story.  Sighet was typical of hundreds of small towns throughout Eastern Europe where Jews were herded onto trains.  In the cities and larger towns, ghettoes were created.  Sighet had a couple of ghettos (the large and the small one), but the Jews were confined there for only a few weeks.  Sighet and Hungary in general were unusual in that the Final Solution was not instituted there until quite late in the war.[14]  The result was that the experience of the Jews of Sighet was a condensed version of the experience of millions of other Jews in Europe.  The Germans did not arrive in Sighet until Passover of 1944, which was in early April.[15]  After a series of decrees and restrictions, the Jews were told to live in ghettoes (the larger ghetto was in Wiesel’s neighborhood, so they did not have to move).  On May 14, the deportations began; on May 16 the Wiesel family was forced to leave their home and move to the small ghetto.  They left Sighet on May 20.

Sighet today is in northwestern Romania, on the border with Ukraine (the Ukrainian towns of Khust and Rakhov to the northwest and northeast, respectively).  Until the end of World War I, Sighet (known as Máramarossziget) was part of the Kingdom of Hungary, but by the terms of the Treaty of Trianon (which ended the war between the Allies and Hungary), the town became part of the Kingdom of Romania (and was known as Sighetul Marmatiei).  During the 1930s the county of which Sighet was the capital was split, the northern part going first to Czechoslovakia, then back to Hungary in 1938.  In 1940, Hungary got the rest of the region around Sighet and the town itself.[16]  After the war, Hungary was again restricted to its post World War I boundaries and Sighet became part of Romania again, while the county around it became part of Ukraine.  The region around Sighet and Sighet itself still contains a substantial percentage of Hungarians, but no Jews to speak of.

In comparing details in Night with accounts in All Rivers Run to the Sea, it appears clear that Night is not fictional.  Describing it as “semiautobiographical” also seems inaccurate; it is completely autobiographical.  Wiesel states that “Night is not a novel” in correcting one of Mauriac’s statements (All Rivers 271).  A few of the dates in Night, however, do not appear to be accurate.  For example, Wiesel speaks of the day before the deportations as being “the Saturday before Pentecost” (10), which would have been May 27, but according to the dates in the memoirs, this date was actually two weeks earlier.  Later the day that Eliezer and his father are marched to Buna is described as “a beautiful April day” (37).  More important are the details that look as if they must be exaggerations.  In one of the most horrifying scenes in the book, just after he and his father have been separated from the rest of the family, Wiesel tells of the Germans throwing babies into a burning pit:  “Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames.  They were burning something.  A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load—little children.  Babies!  Yes, I saw it—saw it with my own eyes . . .  those children in the flames” (30).  I had interpreted this passage to mean that the Germans were throwing the bodies of children into the burning pit, which is horrifying enough.  In his memoirs, though, Weisel makes it clear that he meant that children were killed in this manner:

It took me a long time to convince myself I was not somehow mistaken.  I have checked with others who arrived that same night, consulted documents of the Sonderkommandos, and yes, a thousand times yes:  Unable to “handle” such a large number of Hungarian Jews in the crematoria, the killers were not content merely to incinerate children’s dead bodies.  In their barbarous madness they cast living Jewish children into special tended furnaces.  (78)

The only significant way that the events in Night differ from the historical record appears to be in what is left out.  In Night Wiesel stresses how his family was completely oblivious to their fate.   They ignore Moshe the Beadle, “the first survivor” as Wiesel calls him in the memoirs, testifying to the horror that awaits them.  Apparently, the Jews of Sighet were quite ill informed about the possibility of genocide, but there were some signs.  In his memoirs, Wiesel writes of how his father would help the refugees by getting them the necessary papers and supplying them with foreign currency (one of these refugees was an assimilated Jew and his family from Cracow; they spoke mainly Polish and a refined German, not Yiddish [56-57]).  Earlier in the war Wiesel’s father was even arrested for these activities; he spent weeks in prison in Sighet and nearby towns (31).[17] 

Rather than dwelling on smaller historical details, our students can explore some of the broader themes in this work.  One obvious one is the nature of the death camps itself.  Wiesel’s experience at Auschwitz itself was relatively mild in that he did not arrive there until June, and the work they had to perform was not as arduous as that performed by many other slave laborers.  Conditions were quite terrible, nonetheless.  Any of the portions of the film Shoah where Holocaust survivor Filip Müller speaks are a good support to Night, for Müller was a member of the Sonderkommando—the Jews detailed to clean out the gas chambers—during the same period that Wiesel was at Auschwitz.[18]  

Understandably, Wiesel himself has some very strong opinions concerning the lack of intervention from the Allies.  He expresses these views are several points in Night.  While understandable, his views are not accepted by all historians.  Like most survivors, he strongly believes that American aircraft should have been used to bomb Auschwitz during the summer on 1944. As Raul Hilberg describes, the first Allied reconnaissance plane flew over Auschwitz as early as April 4, 1944 (when Wiesel’s family was preparing for Passover before their deportation); the Allies were looking for activity at the synthetic oil and rubber works.  None of the photographs taken at this time was analyzed for what later became visible on the periphery of the main target:  the gas chambers themselves.  There were later four separate raids on Auschwitz III (Monowitz) starting on August 20 and concluding on December 26, 1944, involving as many as 127 B-17 bombers (Destruction, student ed., 322-23).  To Wiesel and other survivors in the death camps themselves, it appeared obvious that the Allies should have been able to have bombed the gas chambers themselves:  “We were not afraid,” Wiesel recounts in Night, while acknowledging that the bombs could easily have killed many prisoners, “But we were no longer afraid of death; an any rate, not of that kind of death.  Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life.  The raid lasted over an hour.  If it could only have lasted ten times ten hours!” (57).  The military historian James H. Kitchens has since argued that a raid of the type that Wiesel and other critics of the Allied strategy had in mind was in fact impossible for a variety of technical reasons.  The issue is a complex one, however, and it is not at all clear that the bombing strategists or Kitchens himself are entirely correct.[19]

Another issue concerning Allied intervention is why the Hungarian Jews were so ill informed about their fate as late as April 1944.  Wiesel describes how their thinking was shaped by the events of 1944, especially from the news that they heard on the radio.  In his memoirs, Wiesel emphasizes this point even more strongly:  “To the very last day, with his very last weapons, [Hitler] would strike inexorably at the last Jewish survivors of his empire.  Washington knew it, and so did London.  Stockholm knew it, and so did Berne and the Vatican.  But we, in our little town did not” (56).  The reasons for this neglect were complex.  Part of it had to do the situation in Hungary, which had managed through various maneuverings to protect its Jews (and other Hungarians) from the full force of Nazi policies.[20]  Starting in March 1944, the Germans began implementing the Final Solution in Hungary; in a very short time 550,000 of the Hungary’s approximately 750,000 Jews to death camps were deported and killed, mostly at Auschwitz, which had been refitted for this operation.  But the Allies were in general preoccupied with military aspects of the war.  It is certainly worth investigating the issue of whether they could have done much more, such as warning Jews in areas, such as Hungary, and even intervening to protect them, as Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats were able to do in the larger Hungarian cities, especially Budapest.[21]

The real value of Night, though, is in the personal picture it creates of the figure of 16-year-old Eliezer who experiences horrible things, especially the death of his father after so much effort to keep him alive.[22]  An almost universal theme that emerges from survivor accounts is how the survivors, who suffered unimaginably, felt guilty for surviving, while the perpetrators did not.  The random nature of their survival was certainly one factor here.[23]  In some cases, this guilt may have occurred because survivors were aware that they survived purely at the expense of others (as the passage of Vladek’s ride in the train demonstrates).  In general, Wiesel did nothing to be ashamed of later, but Night always holds out the possibility that he very easily could have, and during the experience, Wiesel comes to feel that he has mistreated his father.  Related to this process is the loss of dignity that Wiesel goes through. Eliezer’s first loss of dignity occurs soon after their arrival when the gypsy Kapo beats his father and Eliezer does nothing (37); when this happens later, he tries to determine how to keep from being hit himself and he becomes angry with his father for not knowing how to avoid the Kapo (52). 

I have asked my students to consider other cases in the book of other father-son relationships, where the son mistreats or even sacrifices his father to save himself.  The tone is set by Eliezer’s experience upon first arriving at Auschwitz, when he learns that Bela Katz, an acquaintance from Sighet, had been forced to put his own father’s body into the crematory (33).  Later, on the march to Gleiwitz, Eliezer remembers that he has seen Rabbi Eliahou’s son desert his father in the rush (86-87); in the open-air train, Eliezer witnesses a son snatch bread away from his father, only to be killed himself moments later by others who take the bread (95-96).  A good way to begin this discussion is to ask the students what they think of the advice that the head of the block gives to Eliezer at Buchenwald:  “Here, there are no father’s no brothers, no friends.  Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.  I’ll give you a sound piece of advice—don’t give your ration of bread and soup to your old father.  There’s nothing you can do for him” (105).  Is this really “sound advice”? Is this the code by which Vladek lived in Auschwitz?  What is the significance of the fact that Wiesel begins two different paragraphs on the next page with the words, “I did not move”?  How did Wiesel’s experience in Auschwitz, on the march, and at Buchenwald shape how he himself responds to this question?

Another issue in which students are often intensely interested is the question of Eliezer’s religious faith.  Clearly that faith, which had been so strong, at least in its outward forms back in Sighet, is being tested:  upon his arrival at Auschwitz, Eliezer feels “revolt rise up in me” when someone recites the Kaddish (31).  Although he thanks God for creating the mud that hides his shoes (35), he has ceased praying by the end of that chapter (42).  After the second hanging scene (60-62), Elizer seems to have lost faith in God altogether.  He becomes angry with God at the start of the next chapter as the entire block celebrates the Jewish New Year (late September 1944); he feels stronger than God and feels himself to be his accuser (63-65).   The story of Akiba Drumer shows the futility of Cabbalistic hope (42, 48, and 72-73); a rabbi from Poland also loses his faith (72-73).  Nevertheless, he prays on the march to Gleiwitz to be given the “strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son has done” (87).  Some students may conclude, perhaps prematurely, that Wiesel has lost his faith as a result of his experiences.  Most students, though, notice something else happening.  They are not quite sure what to make of it, though, because in their experience one does not talk to or think of God in the way that Wiesel does.

Wiesel has felt that the second hanging scene has been misinterpreted enough that it required a response on his memoirs.  That scene “has given rise to an interpretation bordering on blasphemy,” he writes.  He tries to set his readers straight:

I have never renounced my faith in God.  I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it.  . . .  the texts cite many occasions when prophets and sages rebelled against the lack of divine interference in human affairs during times of persecution. . . .  If that hurts, so be it.  Sometimes we must accept the pain of faith so as not to lose it.  And if that makes the tragedy of the believer more devastating than that of the nonbeliever, so be it.  To proclaim one’s faith within the barbed wire of Auschwitz may well represent a double tragedy, of the believer and his Creator alike.  (84)

It may be helpful for students to research these views of Wiesel and of the sort of religious faith that he has practiced all his life.  On the other hand, the second hanging scene also offers the opportunity of investigating why Wiesel writes such a powerful passage.  What does the dead child represent, if anything?  How are we to regard the “voice within me” that Eliezer speaks of, the voice that says that God is hanging here on this gallows” (62)?  What does it mean to say that “the soup tasted of corpses”?

Although Night contains many passages that invite close textual analysis and that are relatively easy to quote because of their directness, I like to encourage students to explore how this book adds to their knowledge of the victims’ experience in general.  I find that after studying Maus, students find Night to be a more profound work, but I believe they come to this perception because they had developed some familiarity with the issues that preoccupy survivors.  Many of the topics described above can be enlarged by asking students to expand their papers into a consideration of Maus on the same issue.  Although the two works are profoundly different in conception and form, there are many striking similarities:  both concentrate on a father-son relationship; both take place at Auschwitz during the same period; both Vladek and the Wiesels set off on the death marches back into Germany; both books are dedicated to the younger sibling of the author, who perished in the Holocaust.  It works well to draw out the common points between these two works by having the class view and then write about excerpts of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.  Depending on our complex the writing is intended to be, the instructor can even require that the students incorporate examples or information from all three works into formal papers or even more informal response assignments.

In this section I suggest four short excerpts from Shoah that I have used to discuss the experience of the victims.  (I have noted the pages in the text of the film that the excerpt covers, the approximate location on one of the five cassettes that shows the film, and the length of the sequence in minutes and seconds.[24])  I recommend having students view and write about these excerpts at regular intervals during their reading of Maus and Night.

·        “We’re shipwrecked.”  Arrival at a Death Camp (pages 34-41 [40-50 in the Pantheon edition], end of Cassette 1, 22:30): In this passage, three survivors relate what would happen as the victims arrived in the death camps.  Rudolf Vrba speaks first, in English.  Interviewed in New York, he relates his experience of working on the “ramp” in Auschwitz. His viewpoint alternates with those of Abraham Bomba and Richard Glazar, who are both survivors of Treblinka.[25]  Bomba, a barber by profession, is interviewed in Israel, and he speaks in English.  Richard Glazar, who lives in Switzerland, speaks in German.  Lanzmann is the interviewer, speaking either English or German as the situation calls for it.  Bomba and Glazar tell the story of their own arrival at Treblinka, their separation from the other members of their family, the realization that their families have been put to death almost immediately upon arrival, and their first night in the death camp, knowing that they are the only members of their families to survive.  Vrba’s comments serve to provide kind of an overview of the whole process.  As the survivors speak, the film cuts to scenes of Auschwitz (with his rusting railway tracks leading up to the famous ramp) and Treblinka, where there are a large number of stone monuments for each village of Jews that perished at that site.  This is a good time to explain to students briefly how Treblinka and Auschwitz operated.[26]  I have often asked students to write about this passage in response to a prompt like the following:

Suggested starting points for a journal entry:  What emotions do you have as you listen to these stories?  Are you struck by any aspects of the survivors’ demeanor as they narrate these events?  You might also write down any observations to the questions in the previous paragraph.  What are your first impressions of this film?  How do these impressions compare with your expectations as you looked at the script before viewing the film?

Some students find Vrba to be almost smirking, as he explains operations at Auschwitz.  They seem to be reacting to a kind of ironic half-smile that Vrba sometimes displays.  It helps to explain that Vrba is one of a very small number of people to have escaped from Auschwitz.[27]  He made strenuous efforts to communicate his knowledge of Auschwitz to the outside world, but his efforts had no effect on the actions of the Allies.  In Night, Wiesel describes how some of the prisoners were angry when they saw the Hungarian Jews arriving (28-29).  In his memoirs, he explains that these prisoners were enraged because they thought the Hungarian Jews should have know about Auschwitz from information carried by Rudolf Vrba and another escaped prisoner Alfred Wetzler (77).  There is a certain bitterness and irony in Vrba’s demeanor, which students can misinterpret.

Richard Glazar explains his arrival at Treblinka to his friend Carel Unger as follows:  “It’s a hurricane, a raging sea.  We’re shipwrecked.  And we’re still alive.  We must do nothing but watch for every new wave, float on it, get ready for the next wave, and ride the wave at all costs.  And nothing else” (40 [48]).  Students can be asked to consider whether this is an apt metaphor.

·        “The Germans made us refer to the bodies as Figuren.”  Discovering One’s Family Among the Victims (pages 4-9 [7- 13], beginning of Cassette 1, 9:15).  One of the most horrible scenes experiences that survivors faced was seeing acquaintances or members of their families killed or discovering their bodies among the dead.  Sometimes the Nazis would deliberately force family members to watch as their relatives were killed, but it is more common for this to have occurred by accident.  A seven-minute sequence toward the beginning of the Shoah provides a moving account of this experience.  Michael Podchlebnik recounts how he was forced to unload corpses from the gas vans at Chelmo and discovered on the third day the bodies of his wife and children.  This sequence allows students to understand the painful nature of many of these memories.  In showing only a segment of the film, it is necessary to provide a context.  I make a brief oral introduction to the segment and distribute a hand-out to which the students can refer later.  Here is an excerpt of the my explanation for this first sequence:

This segment spans several different interviews.  To understand it, you must realize that the first killing of the Jews by gas began in the little Polish town of Chelmo.  The Nazis resorted to this technique when it became obvious that killing large numbers of people by gunfire was impractical.  Four hundred thousand people were killed by the use of gas vans:  the victims were forced to enter the van in the town of Chelmo.  The engine was started and the exhaust was connected to a special tube so that it was pumped into the back of the van.  The van would then drive out of the town, out into the forest, where there were mass graves.  By the time the van arrived at the graves, all the people in back would be dead.  At first the victims were simply buried.  Later, though, the Nazis had the graves dug up, and they burned the bodies.

Only two people emerged alive:  Simon Srebnik and Michael Podchlebnik, both of whom now live in Israel.  Both are interviewed in the film.

This excerpt begins part way through the interview with Michael Podchlebnik on page 4, right where Lanzmann asks, “Why does he smile all the time?”

The next page cuts to interviews with two men who now live in Israel, Motke Zaïdel and Itzhak Dugin, both survivors of Vilna (in Lithuania).  Both these men now live in Israel, and they are interviewed there in Hebrew.  The interviews start with a statement by Hanna Zaïdel, the daughter of Motke Zaïdel. The photograph on page 9 shows Itzhak Dugin and Hanna Zaïdel during the interview; Hanna’s father, Motke, is sitting just to the left of Itzhak Dugin on the couch.  Lanzmann takes the men out to a part of Israel that reminds them of part of Lithuania.  The next scene shows part of the forest near Sobibor in Poland; it is an interview with Jan Piwonski, a Pole (who speaks in Polish, naturally).  We later learn that Piwonski worked as assistant switchman at the Sobibor Station in 1942 (32 [38]), but in this section he just talks about the forest near Sobibor, where one of the few serious revolts against the death-camp guards occurred.

The film then cuts back to the interview with Podchlebnik, who tells about having to unload the gas van that contained his wife and his children.  This is followed by excerpts from the interview with Zaïdel and Dugin who had to help dig up the graves near Chelmo so that the bodies could be burned.  Itzhak Dugin recognized the bodies of his entire family in this mass grave.

Questions for your journal writing:  Describe the scenes that go with the words in your text, and tell of your emotional reaction to this section.  What is the purpose of including that brief statement by Hanna Zaïdel at the beginning of this section?  How is the talk of the trees growing in the Sobibor forest connected to the discussion of the survivors encountering the bodies of their families in the gas van or the mass graves?  Can this be linked to the presence of Hanna Zaïdel in the film?  Consider the fact that Dugin and Zaïdel seem to be interviewed in Zaïdel ‘s house with his family around him (you can hear the sound of people washing dishes or something in the background).

My purpose in choosing this sequence is so that the students can contemplate the transformation that Podchlebnik undergoes when Lanzmann asks him how he reacted when he saw the bodies of his wife and children.  The sequence also illustrates the way that the Nazis attempted to obliterate their crimes and obliterate the victims themselves, actions that went beyond killing the victims (if that is possible).  In the final interview, two survivors now living in Israel recount how the Nazis forced them to refer to corpses of the victims, which they were forced to dig up and burn, as Figuren (puppets or dolls) or Schmattes (rags).[28]  Earlier one of these men, Motke Zaïdl, is interviewed in his home among his family.  Lanzmann seems to be emphasizing how the Germans were unsuccessful in this case; his daughter, born after the Holocaust, is evidence that Zaïdl at least is remembered by his family.  This is in contrast to the trees that were planted at Sobibór, trees that are growing in the ashes of the victims.

It is not so important that students these exact ideas in their journal.  What is more significant is that this activity places them in a situation that is rich with possibilities for writing.  Instead of discussing these scenes in class, I often ask the students to write about their response first.  When we do have discussion, their responses are often more thoughtful and deepened by the earlier experience of writing.  Even when they are not, the students are beginning to practice putting a complex reaction that they may have into words.

·        “It was very hard to feel anything.”  Scene in the Barbershop with Abraham Bomba (pages 101-08 [111-17], middle of Cassette 3, 19:00):  One of the most powerful and disturbing sequences in the film is Abraham Bomba’s description of how he was forced to cut women’s hair at Treblinka.[29]  Lanzmann very methodically questions Bomba about how the hair cutting took place.  When he asks Bomba how he felt when he saw the victims come to him for their haircuts, Bomba does not answer the question directly.  When Lanzmann returns tot he question a few minutes later, Bomba replies:

I tell you something.  To have a feeling about that . . .  it was very hard to feel anything, because working there day and night between dead people, between bodies, your feelings disappeared, you were dead.  You had no feeling at all. As a matter of fact, I want to tell you something that happened.  At the gas chamber when I was chosen to work there as a barber, some of the women that came in on a transport from my town of Czestochowa, I knew a lot of them.  I knew them; I lived with them in my town.  I lived with them in my street, and some of them were my close friends.  And when they saw me, they started asking me, Abe this and Abe that—“  What’s going to happen to us?  What could you tell them?  What could you tell them? A friend of mine worked as a barber—he was a good barber in my hometown—when his wife and his sister came into the gas chamber . . . .  I can’t.  It’s too horrible.  Please.  (107 [116])

Our usual expectations are that the interview would end here, but Lanzmann continues to film. Almost five minutes pass before Bomba regains control and gestures that he is ready to continue.  During that time, Lanzmann coaxes him to go on in a gentle voice, while Bomba pleads, almost whispering, for the filming to stop.  He then finishes his answer as follows;

They tried to talk to him and the husband of his sister.  They could not tell them this was the last time they stay alive, because behind them was the German Nazis, SS men, and they knew that if they said a word, not only the wife and the woman, who were dead already [i.e., as good as dead already], but also they would share the same thing with them.  In a way, they tried to do the best for them, with a second longer, a minute longer, just to hug them and kiss them, because they knew they would never see them again.  (108 [117])

The segment of film is 19 minutes long and is quite stressful to watch, so much so that I do not find it feasible to have class discussion immediately following it. But if class time can be found or if the course is using Shoah in other contexts, this segment can provoke strong and interesting student reaction.  Students must first have observed Bomba’s demeanor in earlier interviews where he tells of terrible events and yet appears to remain emotionally detached.  I have asked students to write in their journals of their reactions to Bomba’s interview using this prompt:

What is your initial reaction to this segment of the film?  What do you think of the way that Lanzmann carries out the interview?  How would you describe Lanzmann’s voice as he speaks to Bomba? 

Read through the information about how and why Lanzmann made this scene the way that he did (beginning of this handout).  Then read through the interview again.  Keep in mind that Lanzmann set up the scene with Bomba in the barbershop in order to create a reaction in him, but that Bomba also knew this and could have walked out of the scene at any time.  After reflecting on this information, come back to your journal and try to develop your ideas further.  Do you find any difference in how you think of this scene after reflecting on it compared to your initial reaction?  What has happened to Bomba during the interview?  Is Lanzmann right to feel almost proud of this section of the film?  Why or why not?

One of my students wrote as follows:

We understand that Bomba was in many ways dead during the Holocaust and he still remains numb to what he saw and did.  He even says that he had to act as if he was dead and that nothing mattered or else he could not have survived.  Even as Bomba begins to talk to Lanzmann. he talks too calmly and is too unaffected by what he is saying.  . . . But as he begins telling more and more, Lanzmann keeps pushing and somehow revives Bomba by letting him release some of the bottled up emotions he has.  As a viewer I felt most moved by this scene and I felt a human connection to Bomba.  I believe this scene is incredibly important in understanding Lanzmann’s attempts.  Lanzmann wants to revive the memories of the Holocaust.

Other students are angry with Lanzmann for pushing Bomba so hard.  When asked to describe Lanzmann’s voice, they will often say it is hectoring or grating.  Bomba is being forced to behave this way, they sometimes say; Lanzmann has become a Nazi himself. The critic Jay Cantor shares this view.  Lanzmann achieves, in Cantor’s view, “a kind of necessary near-identification with the Nazis” (181).  Cantor points out, though, that Bomba is probably speaking